Society in general and business in particular have become increasingly dependent upon electronic communications. Most electronic communications involve or require the use of electronic mail (email) addresses. In fact, many transactions occurring over the Internet require a user to provide his/her email address in order to successfully complete those transactions.
As a result, over time users have increasingly provided their email addresses to a myriad of enterprises, and these email addresses have been subsequently used for purposes that the users never anticipated, never desired, and never expected. For example, a user's email address can be sold from one enterprise to another enterprise and then used for purposes of finding private or confidential information (e.g., address, phone number, name, etc.) about the user. An email address can also be used to harass a user with unwanted solicitations sent via email spam. Additionally, an email address can be used for maliciously propagating computer viruses to a user's computer.
A user is generally not in a position to deny an enterprise his/her email address. This is particularly true when a user needs to transact with the enterprise and that enterprise requires a valid email address for the transaction. Because of circumstances such as this, users will often go to a free email service, such as Yahoo or Hotmail and create an email account, which the user manually monitors, manages, and provides to the enterprise. This is not efficient, is time consuming, and creates further problems for the user and for the free email service. Some problems associated with a free email address from a user's perspective includes situations where a user forgets his/her free email address, forgets his/her password which is needed to access the free email account, or forgets to clean up accumulated messages from his/her email inbox, such that no additional email messages is accepted into the email account. From a service provider's perspective, a variety of management rules must be continually monitored, altered, and enforced against free email subscribers (users) so that the service can continue to operate effectively. This is so, because without extensive management the free email service would rapidly deteriorate because there is only a limited amount of storage, bandwidth, and processing capabilities that the service provides to a potentially limitless number of users. As a result, it is not uncommon for a service provider to limit the size of email messages that can be sent or received by an email account, to limit the number of messages that can be retained within an account's inbox, and to remove accounts where the associated users have not logged into the account after a defined period of elapsed time.
Additionally, many enterprises contractually assert that a user's email address will not be disclosed, sold, or provided to other partners. These contractual terms are often expressed in an enterprise's privacy policy or are affirmatively made via check box links from the enterprise's web sites with such phrases as “I do not wish my email address to be provided to any partners of the enterprise,” and the like. However, users have no way of knowing when these contractual terms have been breached by the enterprise.
Once more, users usually have no way of proving or demonstrating that an enterprise has in fact violated its obligations by the unauthorized disclosure of an email address. This is so, because a user will generally only have one or at most a few email addresses and when that email address is provided by an enterprise to one of its partners that partner will not identify to the user how it was that the partner acquired the user's email address in any communications made with the user. Thus, the user may suspect a certain enterprise has violated a contractual obligation with the user, but the user has no way to demonstrate this breach.
In some cases, users become so frustrated that their privacy is being compromised and their email inbox has become nearly unusable since it is littered with spam and potential viruses, that the users will shut down one email account with an ISP entirely and open a new email account with another ISP and start anew. But, this is frustrating as well, because there are many friends, family members, and legitimate enterprises that communicate with the users via the old email address. In many cases, each of these entities must be manually notified about a user's changed email address and it will take sometime before things return to normal for the user.
Anyone that transacts and communicates via electronic email is familiar with the problems mentioned above and with many other problems that are associated with providing one's email address over a network, such as the Internet. Users have come up with their own techniques and workarounds to these problems, but each of these workarounds are not optimal, are unnecessarily cumbersome, and are time consuming.
Thus, improved techniques for managing an email address are needed.